


All of Me

by JulyStorms



Series: Before Colors Broke into Shades [7]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:46:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1923810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time they reached the trees, Sylvia's sides were heaving, her flanks covered in sweat-foam, but they couldn't afford to stop; two titans had become more. Hange refused to look behind her, but she could tell by the way the ground shook that one of them was at least a 13-meter class.</p><p>And all she had with her was one blade and a horse who was about to drop dead of exhaustion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. for you, i will

**Author's Note:**

> I am not very good at action scenes, but I did my best. I'll happy take critique if you have any to offer. This is part one of three. Inspiration for this piece is [this piano piece](http://youtu.be/9fAZIQ-vpdw) of the same name composed & played by Jon Schmidt.
> 
> Allyfoo on Tumblr drew me [this lovely giftart](http://allyfoo.tumblr.com/post/91721822294/a-gift-for-julystorms-for-breaking-my-heart-and) to go along with this story, too! ;___;
> 
> Edit 19 November 2017: Stohessdistrict on Tumblr made me [a lovely poster](http://stohessdistrict.tumblr.com/post/167660082818) to go with the story! Check it out!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hange's perspective: her relationship to Levi, to Mike, and to the Corps.

Hange hit the ground running, impressive considering that her gas tank had emptied halfway to the ground, sputtered pathetically, and she had only been half-aware that it would happen. She felt the impact in her ankle and calf—it shot right up into her kneecap and lingered there as she just kept moving forward.

What else could she do? Stop to see if her ankle needed wrapped? There wasn't time for that—wasn't time for anything.

She tried to whistle for her horse, but the sound came out half-choked when she stumbled over a rock; her hands went out in front of her, and she landed on them, scraping the palms. Getting up again was painful, but it was over within seconds; there were footsteps pounding behind her and she only had one blade left, chipped and dull and probably useless. Running was her only real option.

It was when Hange started to seriously consider turning around to face her fate that the sound of hoofbeats reached her ears. Her breath caught in her throat when she turned to see Sylvia running ahead of the two four-meter titans that had started to chase her only minutes ago; the mare pulled to a stop beside Hange, stamping impatiently, snorting and tossing her head. Hange didn't think twice about it: she scrambled up into the saddle and Sylvia needed no encouragement from her to take off at a gallop straight for the closest cover: a copse of trees to the southwest.

By the time they reached the trees, Sylvia's sides were heaving, her flanks covered in sweat-foam, but they couldn't afford to stop; two titans had become more. Hange refused to look behind her, but she could tell by the way the ground shook that one of them was at least a 13-meter class.

And all she had with her was one blade and a horse who was about to drop dead of exhaustion.

She knew how it would end: Sylvia would keel over and then Hange would be trapped in the middle of nowhere with no real way to defend herself. She swallowed hard and held onto the frayed leather of Sylvia's reins.

It didn't happen like she thought it would. The footsteps grew closer and closer but she hardly heard them over the beat of her own heart pulsing in her ears and throat. The next thing she knew she was flying—toward the trees on Sylvia's back. Instinct took over, or maybe it was something else: fear. She let herself fall out of the saddle, felt  _something_  crack in her body, but she was rolling over the ground too fast to determine what it was, and she didn't care if she'd lost her goddamned  _leg_ , she'd be up and running again as soon as she stopped moving.

There was a sickening  _thud-crunch_  and a panicked, choked sort of sound, and then  _nothing_. It took Hange a moment to realize that it had come from Sylvia and not her own mouth. She righted herself and didn't dare look around: she just ran for the trees, ran for them as fast as she could and scrambled into the underbrush, suddenly unable to remember if she had decided titans could smell or not. She didn't make it far before even she couldn't continue through the thick tangles of plants, and then she just stayed there on the ground, face against the cool moss of the forest floor, until her head stopped spinning and her vision began to clear. One lense of her goggles was broken; she pushed what remained of it out of the frame and readjusted them before getting to her feet. She could hear titans moving around in the area, but it was sort of dark where she was, and she hoped that she was hidden enough to buy herself even just a few more minutes to think.

Two members of her squad were dead. Moblit had gone back with an injured Henri to the campsite, which was at a northern outpost.

Hange had been right alongside Mike's squad, but a flood of titans had separated them. The last she had seen of them, Nanaba had been fighting three on her own. Hange had been dealing with four; but she couldn't get through hers to help Nanaba. When she had taken care of two of the four of her own, Nanaba and the titans she had been fighting were nowhere in sight.

The entire Corps was spread out too thin; she hadn't seen Levi since she'd cinched Sylvia's saddle, and Erwin since after ten o'clock; Nanaba had been more than an hour ago. She wondered, for just a moment, how the others were doing, but quickly shook the thought away: they were fine, and if they weren't, well, it wasn't the time to think about it. She could very well end up dead herself, if she wasn't careful.

She stayed in the underbrush for a handful of minutes, patted herself down, and tried to determine what it was that had cracked so loudly as she'd practically flown across the landscape to the treeline. It wasn't until her breathing slowed down to something resembling normal that she realized it was her ribs—had to be, because even though her knee and ankle were still throbbing, she could move them, albeit stiffly.

She pressed forward, but it was loud in the strange silence, and it attracted the attention of the titans following her. Titans wouldn't notice the sting of thorns scratching against their skin, after all, and they cut through the underbrush almost as if it were nothing at all. She got back to her feet and stumbled forward, chest aching with the effort it took to breathe.

Ahead she could see it: a clearing: small, but there was a tree, climbable. As she half-ran, half-limped, she dropped the useless part of her gear to the ground; it would only hinder her climbing, anyway. A large hand smacked against her back before she could even attempt to climb the thing. It belonged to one of the four-meter classes; it failed to grab her properly, and only succeeded in pushing her forward into the trunk of the tree; her shoulder hit first, and she used the momentum to spin around to face the four-meter with the one blade she had.

Titans were, she supposed, predictable enough. It lunged at her, hand held out like a toddler grasping at a favorite toy: and she waited until the hand was just close enough before she lifted her weapon and cut halfway through the wrist. The blade snapped, and she scrambled around the tree and back into the underbrush on the other side.

It couldn't be later than three o'clock in the afternoon, but she had been fighting since the alarm rang out early that morning; adrenaline was the only thing keeping her moving, but ten minutes after she'd escaped the titan by the tree, she stopped dead in her tracks—almost fell to the ground.

"Levi," she whispered, voice too hoarse to speak loudly.

He was at the edge of the copse of trees—opposite the side she'd entered from—just lying on the ground. He didn't look up when she approached him. He didn't move at all.

Her heart started to pound again, this time harder, and the beat settled into her throat and her fingertips and it was so overwhelmingly loud that her hands shook when she tried to find his pulse.

His chest lifted, just slightly.

It was enough.

Hange had never seen Levi like this before, injured to the point of being completely vulnerable; she decided that she hated it more than anything.

His three-dimensional maneuvering gear was ruined—probably dented in by a titan; she could see the remnants of a number of them on the open grass, and wondered if he'd crawled his way into the shade to avoid detection. She supposed that without his gear, Levi was as helpless as any other human being given a weapon: skilled, yes, perhaps…but still so very human, flightless and small and very capable of bleeding.

But Levi had blades: two of them. They weren't perfect, but they would do. She checked his gas but there wasn't enough left to make it worth switching gear. There was a crashing in the underbrush behind her: brambles being shoved aside as if they didn't hurt a bit. Hange supposed they didn't, of course, not enough to deter a titan, and she wasn't overly surprised when it appeared at the edge of the clearing she herself had emerged from just a moment earlier. It was the same small one she had just attacked. Relief flooded her; there was a good chance that it meant that maybe the others had gotten tired of the chase, or had forgotten about her. Four meters wasn't exceptionally tall, and in ordinary circumstances Hange would have flown at it with little or no thought. But without her gear, it seemed entirely too tall, almost impossible. There was only one way to reach its neck, and that was to cut it down by its legs.

She breathed a prayer under her breath as she ran at it, certain that it would ignore her in favor of Levi if she gave it the chance to see him. It was slow and wore a falsely-polite sort of smile on its face as she dodged around its hand to swing her swords against its right leg as hard as she could.

It worked; the titan fell, and Hange ignored the sharp pain in her ribs as she cut at its other leg; it writhed on the ground in an attempt to get up, but Hange had managed to make her cuts deep enough that its legs couldn't support its weight, and she took the opportunity to get to its neck. The first attempt failed; without the speed of flight on her side, her cuts were shallower, weaker, more pathetic. She hated it, but tried again right away and did it right the second time.

She was trembling when she made it back to Levi with his dulled blades; the right one had broken halfway down on the titan's neck, but she didn't discard it; he had no spares, and if nothing else, his broken blade was still in better shape than the one she had left; hers was little more than a giant butter knife, now.

Levi was looking at her when she kneeled beside him; she made sure to put most of her weight on her good knee.

"Hange?" he asked, and squinted as if he couldn't see her very well.

"What happened to you?"

He ignored the question. "Where's Erwin?"

She decided to answer honestly: "I don't know. Far away by now, most likely. Where is your squad?"

He had to think about that, it seemed. "Eld… Petra… Back to camp," he finally said. "Auruo and Gunther… I don't know."

"Nobody's going to find us here," she told him. "Your gear's ruined. I'm out of gas. These blades suck. What happened to you?"

This time he answered the question. "I hugged a fucking titan," he said.

"They're not very cuddly," was her soft response. She wasn't sure if she was trying to make a joke or if she wanted to cry or—or what.

"You alone?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Your squad?"

"Moblit and Henri went back to camp. Fran and Russell are…"

"Dead."

"Yeah."

Levi fell silent after that, and Hange turned him over to look at him better.

"Your glasses look shittier than usual," he said, and hissed when she touched his stomach.

"You look worse. Did you get clawed?"

He didn't bother answering because the answer was obvious. Hange might have smiled if they had been safe at camp or within the walls, but they weren't. They were probably going to die. But just in case, she hurriedly pulled off one of her boots and took a knife from her pocket to cut the leg of her pants off; it would be a better bandage than nothing at all.

"You should just use my shirt, stupid."

"It's covered in blood." So was his leg. She wasn't sure she'd have time to get his shirt off, anyway.

It felt like an hour had passed, but Hange knew it could have only been twenty minutes at the most: she unbuckled Levi's harness to use as a temporary tourniquet for his leg and did a slipshod job of bandaging his stomach, of slowing the blood flow.

"What happened to you?" he asked, fingertips just barely grazing the side of her head, which had probably bruised three times over already.

She gave him a smile for his efforts. "You must be dying if you're acting worried about me."

"Don't be stupid," he said, and frowned.

"Sylvia's dead," she told him, and hated that she actually felt her throat close up when she thought about it. "I think a thirteen-meter must have kicked her. Sent us—sent us both flying."

"Just a horse."

"I know." It wasn't the first time she'd gotten attached to her horse only to have it die on an expedition. It still hurt more than she wanted it to. It wasn't like she cared about them on purpose.

"Got a plan?"

She clenched her fists, felt the grit from her fall and the forest floor in the palms of her hands. "Well, let's see," she said. "Neither of us have any gas left. We have two blades. You can't move. I can hardly walk on my own." She made herself keep talking, even managed to laugh a bit when she said, "Nothing we can't handle, right?"

Levi didn't say anything at all.

The thirteen-meter titan showed up five minutes later, when Hange was stuffing her feet back into her boots; she stopped her efforts, and jumped up, boots forgotten, biting her lip to keep from making a sound when the motion gave her vertigo.

Levi tried to sit up, hands reaching for blades that weren't there. Hange had them already.

The already-broken blade was the first to be discarded, though it was quite on accident; Hange avoided the first swing of the titan, who was leaning way too hard against a walnut tree that wouldn't be able to support its weight for long; she plunged the tip of the weapon into the flesh of the titan's calf, but she lost her grip halfway through the cut and her blade stayed inside the titan while she lost her balance and hit a cushion of leaves and pine needles.

The next thing she felt was pain in her ribs again as the titan lifted her in one hand, squeezing too hard, as if it was afraid it would drop her. She didn't dare let go of her weapon, but she couldn't move her arm, either, flush against her side.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Levi struggling to get to his feet as if he could help somehow, as if he could do  _anything_ —and she tried to call out, tried to tell him to back off, to hide himself, to—to do anything but try to help her, but there was a loud shout off to the side and then she was falling. The ground was hard this time, less forgiving; she was on her feet before she'd managed to catch her breath, and she almost cried to see Mike's broad shoulders and shaggy hair.

She tried to say his name but choked on it.

He said hers instead: "Hange," low and solid and warm, and for a moment, just a moment, she thought that everything was going to be okay.

But then she saw his eyes through the good side of her goggles, saw him glance to Levi and then to her. The thirteen-meter titan behind her made an odd sound, and Mike moved toward her—one hesitant step.

She met him halfway, took his blade from his hand and turned just in time to get the titan's other hand with what remained of it. They had a minute or two while the titan regenerated its hands, but no more.

"Hange," he said again, and touched her shoulder.

It took her fifteen seconds to realize that Mike was low on gas and had no more blades. "Gas?" she asked anyway, hoping.

He shook his head. "Just enough to—maybe to find a horse," he said. "I can't—"

She stopped him by putting her hand on his, squeezing his fingers. "Mike," she said softly, "I want you to…" She nodded her head toward Levi, who had fallen back to the ground again and was struggling to get back up; seeing him that way hurt her more than her own injuries.

"Hange, I…"

"It'll be all right. Help him.  _Please_."

She wanted to say more, wanted to tell Mike that if he didn't help Levi now, Levi would die—of blood loss or infection or a titan would get him. He couldn't even  _stand_. She couldn't leave him here to fend for himself, on some vague hope that he would still be around when a rescue party arrived.  _If_  a rescue party arrived.

"Yeah," he said. "It'll be all right."

"The fuck are you discussing while there's a titan right there?"

Hange jumped, startled to see that Levi had managed to make his way over to them. His stomach was bleeding again and he was swaying on his feet. She felt something course through her heart, then, strong and fast and warm. She grabbed Levi up into her arms before she could think twice about it, ignored his confused garbling of words and just held him to her, breathed in the smell of him: sweat and dirt and blood and beneath all that, that strong soap he washed his clothes in.

"No," he protested, struggling against her hold as he seemed to realize what it was she was doing. "Shitty-glasses, you're not—"

He was silenced when she pulled away and kissed him—just once, quickly at the corner of his mouth.

And then she turned to Mike. "Take him,  _now_ ," she said, and Mike seemed to understand.

When Levi struggled against him, too, Mike hit him—knocked him clean out in one blow. All Hange could think about was the fact that Levi would be bruised later when he woke up again.

But he  _would_  wake up. That was all she could ask for.

"Thanks," she whispered as Mike hefted Levi over one shoulder.

He didn't smile, didn't even speak. There wasn't a goodbye or a  _see-you-later_  or anything. Mike had always been pragmatic about things like that, about death in the Corps. He had been around it even longer than she had. He had probably lost countless friends and fellow squad leaders to situations such as these.

It wasn't that she wanted to die, of course. She wanted to go with Mike and Levi, wanted to be safe and okay. The pain of dealing with recovery was preferable to the pain of being chomped to bits by a titan.

But Mike had too little gas to try to carry two people who, combined, weighed more than he did. If he took them both, they would all die. It was better to let humanity's strongest soldier live, anyway. That was what she told herself, but maybe she was being selfish, too. She wanted Levi to live because—

Mike brushed his thumb against her cheek, leaned down and kissed it so lightly she wondered a moment later if he had actually done it.

And then he was gone.

She turned around to see the thirteen-meter smiling at her with an expression that looked more like a grimace as its hands finished reforming. It flexed them, experimentally, and then it reached for her.

She dove to the ground and popped up again with Levi's battered blade in hand, and swung at the titan's fingers, but all the weapon did was leave a nick, like a papercut, in its flesh.

Was it the blade's fault? Or was she just too weak, now, to manage to swing hard enough to do any good?

She turned to run out of the titan's reach, but she felt a searing pain as one of its hard nails scraped across her back, tearing easily through her cloak and jacket and shirt. The fingers of her right hand went numb, and the sword fell to the ground.

Vision swimming, she tried to get back to her feet, but felt the heat of the titan's hand as it closed around her again and lifted her up. Its breath was hot. There were tears in her eyes, and her heart pounded in her chest, but she felt…

Satisfied. She hadn't lied to Mike, not really.

Mike would take care of Levi.

Levi would take care of humanity.

Everything would be all right.

She squirmed in the titan's grip as it lifted her up above its face, held her over its open mouth, and let her fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "The Survey Corps goes through a brutal Titan attack while out surveying; your OTP barely survive only to have their gear break and to be cut off from the rest of the Corps, beaten and wounded in the midst of several titans. They eventually come to terms with the fact that they aren't making it out alive, when someone spots them—but their savior only has the time/gas/wherewithal to save one of them."


	2. face my fears, and

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter I really wanted to explore Mike's relationships: to the Corps, to Erwin, to Hange, and to Nanaba. A bit of Mike x Nanaba.

Mike didn't look back— _couldn't_  look back, because it wouldn't accomplish anything. Instead, he forced himself to think only of the things right in front of him: his boots against the grass, Levi's dead weight on his shoulder, the sound of his own loud whistle as it cut across the open land.

His thoughts strayed, despite himself, despite knowing better. He whistled again, but kept running; he couldn't stop. Chances were low that they would live as things stood—both of them. Maybe, Mike thought, if it came down to it, if he had absolutely no other choice, he could survive by sacrificing humanity's strongest. The thought made him feel sick. It didn't help that Levi was still bleeding; the smell curled straight up into Mike's nose, mixed with horse sweat and human sweat and clean air.

He whistled again, heart pounding. Erwin was miles away by now. They would never catch up without a horse. There was no chance of survival at all without a horse. Levi, he thought, could not survive the night without proper care, and even if Mike knew proper care—which he did not—there wasn't a safe place to attempt it.

After a few more minutes, he saw something: a speck on the horizon running straight toward him, small and lean and—

It was a horse.

And for a moment, he hoped that someone from the Corps was riding it: someone with a signal gun, someone like Lynne who would be prepared.

But when the animal grew closer, Mike realized it was just one horse, alone—and it wasn't his. The white marking down the nose: it belonged to Nanaba. It wasn't sweaty or winded when it approached. The mare's ears flicked forward as she came to a stop in front of him, and she lowered her nose into his free hand.

He tried to ignore the worry pushing itself up into his throat. Just because it was Nanaba's horse didn't mean that Nanaba was dead. Horses were abandoned with some regularity, after all. He didn't think he could handle losing two people in one day.

Levi stirred as Mike tried to get up into the saddle. He lifted his head and said something that didn't make any sense.

"We've got a horse," Mike explained. "A fresh one. We're going to find Erwin."

Levi fell silent, didn't argue about being carted around like a sack of potatoes, didn't ask about Hange: he didn't say anything at all. Mike wondered if Levi even knew where he was; surely the blood loss had taken its toll by now.

Mike dug his heels into the sides of Nanaba's spirited horse and held onto Levi as tightly as he could; if a titan appeared, they'd need all the distance they could muster, after all; there was no use adjusting him to a more comfortable position.

It didn't matter, anyway; Levi lost consciousness after only a few jolting steps.

It was quiet after that. A few smaller titans approached from behind, but they were easily outrun. The sun started to set, after that, and the lack of light discouraged titans from exploring as they did during the daylight hours.

The most Levi did for the duration of the ride was stir, occasionally, but he never said a word and he didn't stay awake for long. They reached the outpost after dark and were greeted by the shouts of those on watch. Nobody was asleep, faces shadowed as usual after a bad expedition.

Lynne was the first to greet him, "Squad Leader Mike! And Celeste!" She hooked her hand around the mare's bridle at the cheek, and then saw the lump over his shoulder. "Captain Levi," she breathed when Mike dismounted and she could see the head of dark hair.

"Yeah," was all he could say in response to that. He shifted Levi slightly. "Where's Erwin?"

"Alone," she said. "And worried…I think."

Of course he would be. Two squad leaders missing, Levi nowhere in sight. Erwin was probably half out of his mind with his command structure uncertain. "I'll see him after…"

"Yes, of course," Lynne said, giving him a wobbly sort of smile before she pulled Nanaba's horse toward the hitching post and some well-deserved water. "He looks…bad."

He dropped Levi off at the entrance to the half dilapidated building that they were using for the injured Corps members, and then went to the command tent where, just as Lynne had said, Erwin was sitting—alone.

"Erwin," he said in greeting.

Erwin's head shot up from the parchment that was on the tablet in front of him; he looked tired, almost defeated, really. "Mike," he said. "When did you—?"

"Just a few minutes ago. With Levi. He's in bad shape."

"How bad?"

"Weeks of rest, I guess. Months, maybe."

"We have a few people still unaccounted for," Erwin explained, and he tried to smile, but it looked painfully forced.

"Ben is dead," Mike said, and Erwin marked a small  _x_  next to a name. "Eleanor is also dead."

Erwin marked another  _x_.

"I sent Gelgar back."

"He made it safely."

"Who else?" he asked.

"That leaves Andrew and Rick—"

"Dead," Mike said. "Eleanor reported their deaths to me."

"I see," Erwin murmured, marking two more  _x_ 's. There was one name left. Erwin ran a hand back through his hair before he looked up at Mike. "Have you seen Hange?"

Mike tried not to think about it, tried not to picture her standing there, head tilted back to look up at him, one lens missing from her goggles, face bruised, brown eyes resolute, but the picture floated into his memory as he said, voice sounding far away even to his own ears, "Presumed dead."

Erwin paused at that, quill slipping from his fingers. Ink splattered on the parchment over her name. "Presumed?"

"I found her with Levi. Neither of them had any gas left. Only one sword—dull. Both were injured. She wanted me to leave her and take Levi with me."

"I see."

It happened too often in the Survey Corps: fellow soldiers left behind due to lack of supplies. "He would have died if left alone."

"What are the chances of Hange being alive if we go back in the morning?"

Mike took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. "She was facing a thirteen-meter when I left with Levi."

"Low, then."

His chest hurt when he replied with a soft, "Not worth the risk to our remaining soldiers."

"No, I suppose not."

* * *

Nanaba was alive. He saw Gelgar and Gelgar reported that Henning had come back with Nanaba himself. She was with the injured—not in great shape, but she was all right.

He went to see her, watched her sleep for a while, and then went outside to take a walk.

Moblit was leaning against what had once been a very nice fence. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. He turned when Mike stepped in the rubble of a building, but he didn't smile. "Squad Leader Mike," he said, softly, as if he feared he might wake someone up.

It was almost laughable, really. Only the injured were sleeping tonight. Everyone else was too—too hurt or afraid or sick with worry to sleep.

"I thought you quit smoking."

"I did, too," he said. "After the accident in Squad Leader Hange's lab…" He inhaled, pulled the cigarette away from his mouth, and turned his head to breathe out the smoke, away from Mike. "Well, I guess today I just needed something to—" He didn't finish the sentence.

Mike wasn't sure what to say to that. He crouched down, fingers brushing against a few weeds that grew through the rocks.

"She's not coming back, is she? Sent me back with Henri—a broken arm, you know?—and she's not back yet. I'm an idiot for waiting up for her, aren't I?" He laughed, but it sounded strangled.

The answer hurt, but Mike made himself say it: "Hange's gone."

Moblit was silent for a long time; he finished his cigarette, dropped what remained of it to the ground, and crushed it with the heel of his boot. "I should have been there."

_I was there_ , Mike thought. It hadn't done any good. He'd saved her life, prolonged it just a few minutes.

"I hope it was quick," Moblit said, almost thoughtfully, and then shook his head. "I'm sorry. I sound morbid."

"It's all right." Mike tried not to hear Hange's voice, that careless,  _"It'll be all right."_  Would it really be all right? Was it all right? He didn't know, couldn't know.

"I wish she hadn't ordered me back with Henri. I might have—maybe she would be here, now."

"They say…that the what-if is but boggy ground to build upon."

Moblit tilted his head to the side, lifted an eyebrow slightly. "Who says that?"

"I don't remember. I read it somewhere."

"I guess it's true enough. What's done is done."

"Yes."

Mike was sure that Moblit wasn't  _in love_  with Hange, but he had heard vague murmurings among the Corps that there was a history between them: he was a brother-in-law, or a childhood acquaintance; she'd saved his life, once; she reminded him of a sister who had died in the Corps years earlier.

It didn't matter which rumor was true—if any of them were. What mattered, he thought, was that Hange was dead. It was done and over with, yes, but that did not make it any easier to deal with.

For just a moment, Mike wondered if Moblit would have listened to Hange's request to save Levi, or if he would have ignored it and saved her, instead.

* * *

Nanaba fiddled with the thin blanket around her shoulders. She sat in the back of one of the wagons while they readied everything to go—home, back to the barracks and warm food and something that was kind of like safety.

"Squad Leader Hange's gone, isn't she?"

Mike just looked at her; it wasn't even dawn, yet, and she had woken up less than an hour earlier. How could she possibly know already?

She answered his unspoken question with a soft smile. "Captain Levi was next to me. I saw Auruo come in, and Petra, but… Well, Squad Leader Hange would be there, too, I think, if she were alive."

"I left her to fight a thirteen-meter titan by herself. Without any gas. With one dull sword."

"I'm sorry." Nanaba wasn't one for unhelpful sympathetic commentary.

He was grateful for that.

"It'll be all right," he found himself saying.

* * *

The walk through the city to the barracks was painful. Mike looked straight ahead, focused on the smell of bread baking, of coal burning—on anything but the faces of the crowd.

* * *

He was sitting in his bed, back against the headboard, dressed to sleep, when he heard a knock. Absent-mindedly, he called out a, "Yes?" and the door opened to reveal Nanaba, looking pale. "You should be in the medical wing," he said.

"Captain Levi woke up," she informed him, closing his door behind her. "He wasn't quite…all there. Babbling on—nobody could understand him. He's sleeping now."

Mike felt sick to his stomach as Levi's face just before he'd knocked him out flashed across his memory: the expression could only be described as stricken. "He'll need time," he said. A lot of time—to recover, to process what it was that had happened, to deal with survivor's guilt for the hundredth time.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

The twist of her lip said that she didn't believe him, but she came to sit on the edge of his bed, anyway. "Everyone else is hitting the bottle, tonight. I thought you could use some sober company."

She smelled clean and light and airy; there was nothing of the expedition left except the smell of bandages and the soft, torn skin beneath them.

"I don't feel like talking."

"That's okay," she said, and scooted up onto his bed to sit next to him, arms wrapping around his chest, head settling against his shoulder.

They stayed that way for the rest of the night.

* * *

Levi woke again the next morning. Mike might have missed it, had he not been headed down past the medical wing anyway.

Levi's voice was hoarse, and loud, and—and  _scared_.

"Don't fuck with me!"

Mike dropped his files in the corridor and hurried in to see Levi on his feet—barely. He was shirtless and pantsless and wrapped up in bandages that were slowly turning red. It was so unlike Levi to not care about modesty that Mike knew that Levi had figured out what had happened.

One of the medical officers was trying to get him to calm down, but Levi ignored it, tried to take a step toward him, and then pitched forward. He caught himself on the edge of his bed at the last second.

"Levi," Mike said, pushing past the medical officer.

"Where is Hange?"

Mike didn't answer it; Levi knew the answer. If he thought Hange was okay, if he thought that she was alive, he wouldn't ask after her at all.

"Mike, where the  _fuck_  is shitty-glasses?"

"You need to lie down."

"Don't—" he paused, closed his eyes, took a deep breath. "Just tell me the truth, Mike. I'm a grown-ass man. I can hear the truth."

"…Dead," he finally answered, softly.

Levi was silent. He even let the medical officer help him back into bed, let him unwind the bandages. He didn't make a sound when his wounds were washed. "A body?" he asked.

"Presumed dead," he amended. "What do you remember?"

"I can't think straight right now. Everything's swimming all over the place."

"You should rest."

"I want to know what happened."

"After you've rested, I'll tell you."

"You'll tell me now."

"The short version." Mike related the very basic story to him: "I saved your life instead of hers…at her request."

"You didn't go back to check?"

"No."

"To look for a body? A limb? Her jacket?"

"Levi, we can't spend human lives to look for the corpse of one person, no matter how…much she means to any of us."

Levi knew better. Of course he did. Mike gave him a pass, just this once, because he was disoriented and dizzy and couldn't think straight. Because he had lost the one person who probably meant the most to him.

"I know," Levi said at last.

* * *

Mike avoided Levi, after that, not that it was difficult to do; Levi remained confined to the medical wing for weeks while he recovered. Levi's squad, all of whom had survived the expedition, went to see him regularly.

Mike tried not to listen too closely to anyone's conversations in the mess hall, but he heard them anyway.

"Captain Levi's lost it."

"I heard he was going to try to get Erwin to let him go back to check."

"For what?"

"Proof, I guess."

"What does he need proof for?"

"I don't know. Not coming back should be proof enough."

* * *

Hange's death weighed on Mike's mind heavier than the deaths of previous comrades had. It always hurt to lose someone you liked, but he had liked Hange a lot; her energy was refreshing and she was just as weird as he was. She had accepted him exactly as he was at their first meeting; Mike was not used to being accepted by other people.

Maybe that was why, two months after her death, it still hurt.

"It's not your fault, Mike," Nanaba told him, more than once. "Nobody blames you."

That wasn't the problem, though. The problem was that he blamed himself.

Not entirely, of course. A choice had been made. He had done his best.

It was complicated.

He had been there. He'd seen the look on her face when she'd asked him to help Levi.

Hange had known, then, that she was going to die, but she'd told him to help Levi, anyway. And he'd done it. He hadn't even tried to save them both; he'd just listened to her. And now he was questioning that decision.

Because he missed her.

He missed the way she'd babble at meetings, and the smell of her hair; he missed the sound of her walk and her embarrassed laughter and the light of a candle in her window well after dark.

He had never had many friends, being a rather quiet sort. In the Survey Corps, he had never really  _wanted_  to make any, not after the first few died and left him alone again. But then there had been Erwin, who trusted and believed in him, and Hange, who accepted him for who he was, and Nanaba, who could make him laugh without even trying, sometimes.

He finally said it aloud one evening, when he was playing cards with Nanaba on the floor of his room.

"She was a good friend." It was the first time he had ever said it.

Nanaba stopped shuffling the deck to look at him, an almost startled expression on her face, as if she had thought he would never speak of Hange again. "I know," she told him, and resumed her shuffling.

He was silent until she dealt the cards, and then he said, picking his up to look at them, "I miss her."

He could smell the tears building up in Nanaba's eyes before he could see them. She leaned forward and lifted a hand, placing it on the top of his head. His eyes closed slowly as she brushed her fingers through his hair, pushing it out of his face.

"It'll be all right," she whispered.

* * *

"…going to do it."

"I'm not giving you permission to go  _gallivanting off,_ Levi."

"Gallivanting? Do you even hear yourself?"

Mike hesitated at the door to Erwin's office, but stepped back after a moment, sure that the conversation was a private one.

But that didn't keep him from hearing the rest of it, anyway.

"What do you think you're going to find out there, Levi?"

Mike hadn't heard Erwin's voice raised so loud talking to anyone since—ever, he thought. Erwin had cared about Hange, too, had liked her a lot. He'd even started to groom her to take his place someday, just in case something went wrong, just in case Erwin himself fell victim to the titans like so many others already had.

"Do you think you're going to find her alive and well, sitting on a tree branch? Do you think she's going to lift her arm and wave at you and say something witty about how long it's taken you?"

"Shut up."

"No, Levi. She's dead. You have to face that fact just. Like. Everyone. Else."

"I know she's dead." Levi's voice had grown a little softer, but it was sharp; he was hurting and Erwin had to know it.

"So why do you want to go back there? So that you can find the rotting remains of her carcass, if there's anything left? Maybe part of her goggles? The heel of her boot? Isn't it enough that she hasn't come back? Isn't that proof enough for you?"

"No."

"You want her wings."

Levi was silent.

"For yourself," Erwin added, his voice sounding thoughtful.

"I'm going to go. Tomorrow."

Erwin took a long time to answer, but when he did, his voice was calmer. "Fine," he said. "Take your squad—and Mike; he might remember the location better than you."

The doorknob moved slightly, and then turned, but the door didn't open.

"Levi."

"What."

"Whatever it is you need to find out there, I hope you find it."

* * *

"Do you want to go?" Nanaba was curled up behind him in his bed, fingers in his hair.

He had told her of the mission ahead of him: six of them were to go out to look for Hange.

He sighed against his pillow, eyes closed. "I've seen enough dead bodies in my lifetime."

He had absolutely no desire to see Hange's. It was hard enough to think about.

Nanaba pushed her nose against the back of his head and let out a breath against the short hair of his undercut. "Petra said that Captain Levi has been… Well, I think he needs the closure."

Mike wondered if maybe he did, too. Hange was dead, but he hadn't seen it happen; he had left her to face a titan by herself. Maybe it would be a relief to have proof. He had dreamed of that day so many times…but the dream always stopped at the part where he turned and left Hange's side. He never heard any screams. He never saw anything. He turned away from her, and then he woke up sweating, heart pounding, a guilty feeling in his chest.

"Do you want me to go with you?"

"No."

"All right," she breathed against his hair.

She didn't say anything else; she kept running her fingers through his hair, settled on top of his blankets. Maybe an hour passed before she took her hands back, before she pressed her lips against the top of his head.

She probably thought he was asleep, because she didn't even whisper a  _good night_  as she sat up and swung her legs over the side of his bed.

Something in him broke at the sound of her bare feet against the floor; he wasn't sure what it was, exactly, but it felt like he was losing her, and he had lost enough. It didn't matter that the room she shared with Lynne was a two-minute walk from his own room; it didn't matter that the smell of healing skin was gone, that she was healthy again. Loss still pressed against him and before he could think it through, he said, sitting half up in the bed and turning toward the door,

"Stay."

She smiled at him in the dim moonlight that came in through the window. "Is that an order from my squad leader, or a polite request for company?"

Had it been any other day, any other situation; if his reasons for asking her to stay were any sweeter, any happier, he would have felt his face turn red—might have even laughed a little.

But all of his thoughts tumbled over one another:  _I care about you_  and  _I need you here_  and  _I don't want to be alone_  and  _you'll be safe here_.

He wasn't sure why his voice broke when he settled on, "Please."

Nanaba was in his bed in less than a second, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him close as if she thought it might make everything all right again.

* * *

Petra smiled at Mike when he joined the others, but she looked sad. Auruo was worried, knuckles white as he held the reins; Gunther and Eld spoke softly to one another a few feet away from the group.

It was a quiet trip. Levi insisted on an extra horse, and an extra set of three-dimensional maneuvering gear. Nobody argued with him; his eyes were too tired, and the dark circles beneath them told of way too many sleepless nights. It was, Mike assumed, worse than usual.

The trip there took two days; on the first night, they stayed at the same outpost as they had before. On the second day, they managed to find the same copse of trees.

Levi and Mike dispatched most of the titans who appeared, with help from Auruo, who seemed antsy to do anything but sit in silence on the back of his horse.

When they reached the same forested area, Mike led them through the trees, the same route that he himself had taken two months earlier; he remembered it well enough from his dreams, though the leaves were fuller on the trees now that summer was upon them.

After what felt like an eternity, he landed in the clearing on the other side of the little forest—the clearing where he'd found Hange facing a thirteen-meter alone, trying to protect a badly injured Levi.

Everyone spread out.

Auruo spoke first. "There's part of a sword over here," he said.

Petra lifted another broken sword.

Mike saw Levi stop, saw him bend over something on the ground.

Eld and Gunther were staring at a broken tree; there was blood on the bark.

"What is it?" Mike asked Levi before he could see what it was on the ground that had caught his attention.

Levi didn't look up. "Her boots," he said.

Petra and Auruo dropped what remained of the swords on the ground a few feet away from Levi. Gunther and Eld shook their heads as they approached.

"There's blood over there," Gunther said.

"On the tree and the grass, though the rain washed most of it away."

"Hange?" Levi asked, almost as if he were calling her.

Petra looked to Auruo, who shook his head and looked to Mike. Mike's hands clenched into fists, almost against his own will. He wanted nothing more than to go back to the barracks again.

"Hey—shitty-glasses!"

Petra shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other in the silence afterward, and Eld ran his hand back through his hair. Mike looked back at the extra horse they had brought, tied to Petra's own gelding, and then forced his gaze back to the boots on the ground.

"Well," Levi said, voice just a little too rough, "I guess…" He shook his head and got to his feet, put his left foot into the stirrup and swung his right leg over his horse's back in one smooth motion. "I think we have substantial evidence to say that Zoë Hange is—" nobody missed the break in his voice, but he continued as if it hadn't happened at all, "dead."


	3. i will not fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi's perspective: his relationship to Erwin, to Mike, to his special operations squad, and of course...to Hange.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter! For this chapter you will need…tissues and a comfy quilt to wrap yourself in.

Only idiots bothered to hope for anything in the Survey Corps. Levi supposed it was no different than the Underground in that respect. Hope didn't change the reality of the situation, after all.

And the reality of  _this_  situation was that Hange was…

Well.

He rode ahead of the others, ignoring the worried expressions of his special operations squad.

He was fine.

After all, he wasn't the one who had been left to die.

There wasn't a trace of her left: just her ruined weapons, which at a glance told of their uselessness, and her boots, which were empty and limp and brought back his last memories of her, fuzzy around the edges already.

Mike made a point of not looking at him, which suited Levi just fine. Mike had left Hange to die, after all, and against his better judgment, Levi resented him for it.

* * *

That night, back at the abandoned outpost, Levi overheard his squad talking.

"I was hoping we'd find her," Petra said.

"Did you really think we were going to?" Gunther leaned forward, elbows on his knees, to stare at her.

"Not really," she admitted. "But it would have been nice."

"I knew we weren't going to find her," Auruo interjected, "but," he continued, shouldering Petra, "I thought we'd find something the captain might have wanted to take back with him."

She shoved him back.

Eld was the only one who remained silent, staring off into the distance.

Levi chose that quiet moment to interrupt; he stepped around the side of one of the ruined buildings loudly enough that none of them would miss it. "Get to sleep," he said. "We're leaving early.

"I'm on first watch," Eld told him, blinking as if he had been snapped out of his own world and dumped into the real one.

"Sleep," Levi repeated. "I'll take watch."

To their credit, they didn't argue. They wanted to—he could see it in Petra's face, in the way Auruo's fingers clenched into a fist, in Gunther's posture—but they stood up and moved into one of the small buildings to try to get some rest.

Watch suited Levi just fine. He wasn't going to be able to get any sleep, anyway.

* * *

Erwin greeted him with one raised eyebrow and a solemn expression when he returned to Headquarters. Mike, who had walked with him to Erwin's office, nodded once and then left.

"Anything to report?" Erwin asked, trying to sound unaffected. He failed, of course, though Levi doubted many people would be able to pick up on the way the lines around his mouth deepened as he spoke the question he didn't want to have to ask.

"We found her boots."

"Anything inside them?"

"No." Levi shifted a little, and then added, "She wasn't wearing them when we," he stumbled over the words, "left her."

Erwin stared down at his desk. "Nothing else?"

"Broken and dull swords. Blood." Levi shifted slightly. If Hange were alive, she would have taken the boots with her—taken the swords, as useless as they might have been, because they would still be better than nothing.

"I truly am sorry to hear that." Erwin ran a hand back through his hair and sighed, gaze lifting to meet Levi's; the crow's feet at the corners of his eyes looked more pronounced all of a sudden; Levi couldn't remember having seen Erwin look that way more than once or twice in the last handful of years. It was disturbing.

But only a moment passed before Erwin slapped the mask back into place, his voice turning professional again, his eyes brightening. Levi didn't buy the bullshit façade, not even for a moment, but Hange was only one of a million things weighing on Erwin's conscience.

"I'll be promoting someone to her position soon," he explained. He had the balls to meet Levi's eyes as he added, voice almost gentle but still aggravatingly professional, "Her room needs to be cleared out."

"Get someone else to fucking do it," Levi said without thinking.

Erwin's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "What?"

"Why do I have to clean up all of her shit?"

"I thought you might want to. The two of you were…close."

It was Erwin's way of being polite, but Erwin didn't know  _shit_  about Levi's relationship to Hange. How could he, when it consisted of a thousand different things, small and insignificant to other people, but a part of something he'd shared with her behind closed doors?

"I don't think I can," was his answer.

* * *

But he did. He was the one who went into Hange's closed off room and just stood there for way too long doing absolutely nothing.

The whole room still smelled like her.

It seemed  _alive_  with her: papers scattered across the desk, candle only half-burned on the bedside table, her thin-framed glasses sitting on a small stack of books she had intended to read—the one on top still had a place marked in it with a blue ribbon.

He sank to the floor, let his head rest against the side of her unmade bed, and stayed there for the rest of the night.

* * *

The next morning he started cleaning. The paperwork went to Erwin to sort through. The books were stacked neatly on the floor.

Mike showed up just as Levi finished washing one of the bookshelves.

"What do you want?"

Mike sniffed a little, but his expression betrayed none of his thoughts. "I thought you might want some help."

"From you? No."

"What?"

Levi had never been good with words: he did his best to make himself understood, but he was far from elegant and too often, he spoke his mind about things that were best kept quiet. Hange had never minded that about him—had never held it against him.

"You left her to die," he said.

Mike picked up one of Hange's books, turned it over in his hands, and ran his thumb over the binding. "She told me to save you."

"And you listened to her?"

"Levi, you're being irrational."

Maybe he was. He hadn't slept well in far too long, and here he was, going through Hange's things. Deciding what parts of her were worth keeping, and what parts weren't worth shit.

"Goddammit," he finally muttered. "You should have left me there."

"You would have died. Hange knew that."

"And now  _she's_  dead."

"It was what she wanted."

"She didn't even have her boots on. A fucking thirteen-meter." He bit the inside of his cheek hard.

Mike didn't say anything; his gaze wavered a little, dipped around the inside of Hange's room, lingered on her desk and her still-unmade bed.

Levi sighed, hating how much it hurt to speak: "What do I do with all of this shit?"

"I don't know," Mike said, honestly, still holding the book he had picked up. It was the one from Hange's bedside table—the one that had been marked with a ribbon.

When Mike left with it a minute later, Levi said nothing.

* * *

He ended up keeping almost everything. He moved the bookshelves into his own room with Auruo's help, and Petra joined them to help carry the books. When everyone was asleep, Levi took the few useless knick-knacks she had owned and put them in the bottom drawer of his bureau, tucked beneath her clothes, which he had been pathetically unable to dispose of.

And then he stripped her bed of its blankets and put them on his own bed. Every time he'd slept in her bed he'd made fun of the ugly-ass quilt on the top of it, one she had claimed to have made herself (and he still found the fact a little surprising), but all he could do with it now was pull it around his shoulders.

He spent the night that way, wrapped up in Hange's blanket, sleepless and missing her.

* * *

A few weeks passed.

One night, sleepless as usual, he heard a sound across the hall and almost before he could stop himself, he was there at the door of Hange's room, ripping it open, breathless, heart in his throat, eyes fucking  _stinging_.

"Captain Levi?" a voice asked.

It was a man, young; he had red hair. Levi couldn't remember his name. The kid had been promoted to the position of Squad Leader, and though Levi had been listening when Erwin had given the man's name, he had forgotten it immediately afterward.

"Captain?" he asked again, shirt half unbuttoned, expression fading from surprise to concern.

He hated how hard it was to remember that the room across the hall no longer belonged to Hange.

Levi took a step back, throat burning, chest aching.

"It's nothing," he said.

* * *

For short periods of time, Levi found that he could forget about Hange. But there she was, all over his room in the evenings, in her books and her blankets and her clothes and all of the dumb things he had saved because he couldn't stand the thought of throwing them away or letting someone else have them.

He kept her glasses on his bedside table, remembered putting them there a hundred times before when she'd fallen asleep on his bed, in his arms, face pressed against his neck, legs tangled with his.

" _Stupid shitty-glasses,"_  he'd say, but he'd always take her glasses off as carefully as he could, and he'd always put them, folded neatly, on the little table next to his bed where she would be sure to find them first thing in the morning.

When the weeks turned into another month—the third (though he hated that he kept track, that he remembered such things)—Levi found himself looking at the little knick-knacks he had kept. He knew the story behind one or two things: a gift from her father when she joined the military, a pressed flower from her mother's funeral, but he wondered about the rest. Who had carved the little wooden horse? Who had embroidered the poem onto the delicate white handkerchief he had never seen her carry with her?

The stories never mattered to him before, but suddenly he wished that he knew them, wished for more memories of her, as if they would drown out the last memory that he had.

* * *

When Levi did sleep, he dreamed—restlessly—about Hange. His mind did not bless him with pleasurable memories: of her pressed back against his pillows, back arching up toward him; of her sleeping with her fingers laced through his; of her laughter or her sleepy insistence that she wasn't tired.

Instead, he dreamed of the last time he had seen her.

Of the bruise on the side of her face, one lens of her goggles missing, scratched, bleeding palms, odd, off-kilter walk.

The determination burning in her brown eyes—eyes he'd seen a thousand different times, had seen happy and sad and full of concentration before…but this time it was different. This time, her determination was to save a life,  _his_  life, a life he was sure was not really worth saving.

He always tried to stop her in the dream.

He always said, "No." And he said, "Shitty-glasses, you're not—"

Then the kiss came, and it was horrible because he knew what was happening and he was too dizzy, too weak to do a goddamned thing about it but struggle when she pushed him away from her and toward Mike.

That was where the memory stopped.

That was where the dream faded and he woke up.

The expression on Hange's face, the last image he had of her, left him sitting up in bed, shivering even with the extra blankets tucked around him.

* * *

Levi did not think overmuch about the what-ifs.

They were more useless than hope because they dragged stupid people down and kept them from thinking properly.

But there was one scenario that he wished he had an answer to.

What if Hange had not stumbled across him?

Would she still be alive?

Would he?

* * *

The next expedition took place out of one of the western gates; it didn't last very long, just a few days.

Levi had a hard time concentrating on the battle at hand.

For the first time since he had joined the Survey Corps, he understood why it was that Hange had resorted to anger to get her through battles.

When there was no one to return home to, no one to go to for comfort of any kind, he supposed a person had to use whatever they could to keep going. Before Levi, Hange had had anger and hatred.

For the first time in years, Levi returned to an empty room, an empty bed, and a quiet, horrible stillness that nobody bothered to break for him.

* * *

It was, in the middle of dinner one evening, that Mike stood up, took a deep breath in through his nose, and then fainted dead away.

Levi might have laughed had it not been at least a little terrifying; Nanaba and Gelgar shouted at the same time and Gelgar fell over the bench in his haste to get to Mike's side.

Three slaps from Nanaba later, Mike stirred, put a hand to his head, and sat up.

"You sick?" Levi asked.

"No," he said. "I don't—I can't—but I must be." He got to his feet, shakily, and Nanaba grabbed the back of his shirt.

"Gelgar and I will walk you to the infirmary," she said.

"Yeah. Let's go, Squad Leader."

Levi watched them until they were at the doorway.

But then Mike suddenly fell backward, right on top of Nanaba, and both of them fell to the floor.

There was a commotion in the doorway; Moblit yelled out, "Squad Leader Mike!"

Gelgar leaned down to try to help Mike back to his feet.

Nanaba, squirming beneath Mike, complained loudly, "You're too heavy!"

They managed to get Mike back to his feet and then they walked him out of the room.

"I wonder what that was all about," Auruo said.

"Maybe it's a cold. He needs to stay hydrated." Petra poked at her food and stared worriedly after Mike.

"He needs to stay away from me. I don't want to get sick."

"Nobody wants you to get sick anyway," Petra told him, rolling her eyes. "You turn into a huge baby."

The conversation in the mess hall grew louder, and Levi left it, hoping for some goddamned peace and quiet.

He made it back to his room, but someone was knocking on it—the redheaded squad leader who had replaced Hange. Timothy, he thought the name was.

"Captain!" Timothy said, relief in his voice when he heard Levi's boots against the floor and turned to see him. "Good, you're here! Commander Smith wants to see you right away. Have you seen Squad Leader Mike? He wants to see him, too."

Levi almost groaned at the thought of enduring a meeting, but he said, "Mike went to the infirmary."

"All right, thanks. I'll go get him." The kid took off at a dead run; if nothing else, he supposed Hange's replacement was efficient about getting things done.

Levi dropped his three-dimensional maneuvering gear off in his room and then headed for Erwin's office, his report for the day tucked under his arm. He supposed it wouldn't hurt to save himself a trip by taking it with him, now.

* * *

Erwin's door was locked, but he came to open it himself when Levi knocked.

"What do you want?" Levi asked him, shoving the report into Erwin's chest.

Erwin took it and smiled. "I have something to show you," he said.

Mike rounded the corner behind him, his steps heavy.

"Is it…?" Mike asked.

Erwin's smile grew; he looked terrifying.

And Levi's patience was waning. "The fuck are you idiots going on about?"

Erwin moved aside.

Levi stepped into the room.

And there she was.

Hange.

* * *

The first word out of her mouth was a pleased-sounding, "Hello!"

Mike reacted first, practically leaping over Erwin's desk to get to her. He buried his nose in her hair and finally pulled away, saying only, "I thought…"

She hugged him. He didn't finish his sentence.

They turned to Levi after that. He could feel their eyes on him, but Hange was all he could see.

Was it actually possible?

Was she alive?

Was this a dream: a cruel trick by his mind?

He struggled to open his mouth, to make words come out, but for a long minute, nothing at all happened.

Then he said, "You look like shit."

As soon as he said the words, her eyes softened and he felt moisture on his face: hot fucking tears spilling out of his eyes unchecked. He wasn't sure why it was happening now, why he might cry at the sight of her and not at her death, not at taking her books from her shelves, not at folding her clothes, but at the sight of her breathing and smiling and sitting in a chair.

" _Fuck_ ," he said, and swiped at his face.

* * *

It was true. She did look like shit.

Her shirt was tattered at best, and her cloak half-torn, barely covering her back. She had no shoes, and her pants ended at the knee, fabric frayed and worn thin.

When she stood up, and walked around to the front of Erwin's desk, he could see that her walk was all wrong; something had healed badly. And she was thin—too thin.

"I've never seen you cry before," she whispered.

"Never had a reason."

"I didn't realize that I was ugly enough to make people cry."

"Shut up, shitty-glasses."

* * *

She needed rest, and fluids, and actual food in her system, but Hange insisted on going down to the mess hall herself to see everyone, she said.

It irritated the hell out of Levi, who was still walking around half in a daze, but he went with her to make sure that she wouldn't fall; he wondered if they'd have to re-break something so that her leg would heal right again.

Auruo's expression when he saw Hange was enough to make Hange laugh; Petra started to cry noisily, Eld and Gunther grinned and gave her high-fives. She decided to surprise Moblit in the room that had been her lab; he paled and slid to the ground to see her standing there, and then stammered out a bunch of sounds before he settled on, " _How_?"

* * *

It was the question that everyone wanted an answer to, but Levi refused to let her say anything until she'd eaten; three months she'd been gone, after all…and he doubted she'd had a full meal, let alone a hot one, in all that time.

She was naturally thin, had been thin as long as he'd known her, but he could see her hipbones jutting out over the waistband of her pants, could see the notches of her spine even through her cloak.

* * *

The story was simple.

The titan lifted her up and let her go, but the tree it was leaning against broke and instead of falling into the titan's mouth, she'd fallen onto its face.

"I had that knife, you know?" she said to Levi, and grinned. "I stabbed the hell out of its eyes, but it didn't like that much. Threw me against that tree, and it had already ripped my back open with its nails. Of course, I fell from there, and ran off. Well, limped off. The opposite direction the two of you went in."

Mike nodded.

The thirteen-meter hadn't gone after the two of them, so it had probably been preoccupied with chasing Hange, instead.

He didn't much like the mental image of Hange running away from a titan without shoes or a real weapon or anything but a little knife…just to buy time.

"Anyway, I found a burrow, some kind of animal's home, I guess. I stayed there for a while."

"Hange, I…" It was Mike, voice slow and guilty-sounding even as Nanaba put her hand on his back. "If I had known…we would have sent a team in the morning… I would have gone back for you."

"Yeah, well, you couldn't have known," she told him, and gave him a smile. "You did what I asked you. Levi looks as good as new, now."

Levi didn't know what to say to that.

* * *

Hange left the trees after dark on the second night, and found a better area—where the trees were taller and thicker and it was darker. There was water there, too. After a few weeks of whistling now and then, a horse appeared. She could only move at night, and went the wrong direction—but stumbled on food in the fields of a long-abandoned farm. Fruit trees. And potatoes, not quite ready to be dug up and consumed, but she didn't have the luxury of being picky by that point. She stayed there awhile, to try to get her strength back.

Eventually she figured out her directional error and turned back toward the city, but had trouble avoiding titans.

"There were a couple of really close calls," she admitted, and yawned.

Levi watched her carefully. "Storytime's over," he said, and glared until most people left the room.

Hange turned to Levi. "I heard that someone else took my room."

"You're sharing with Levi, now," Mike said in a deadpan voice.

"Shut up, Mike. I know who goes into your room at night," Levi returned, sounding the same.

"Who?" Hange asked.

"Nobody," said Mike as Levi answered, "Nanaba."

* * *

Moblit had left the story half-way through to draw a bath for Hange. He caught them as they walked down the hall, and Levi thanked him before shoving a protesting Hange ("I'm  _so tired_! I just want to sleep!") into the baths.

"Wash up. You'll feel better."

"Well, since Moblit went to all the trouble."

"I'll be back."

He returned a few minutes later with a change of clothes for her—one of the massively oversized shirts that she had always worn to bed before.

He was not prepared to see her sitting in the tub, head bent forward in between her knees to try to get her hair wet without making a mess.

Her back was scarred, he assumed due to being scratched by the titan's nail. Of course she could not have wrapped it well; she had had nothing clean to wrap it with, nothing to truly wash the dirt out of it, either, and no way to pick the splinters out from the tree trunk except with her own hands.

"Does it still hurt?" he asked, fingers brushing against her skin as he kneeled next to the washtub.

She shivered, but hummed out a thoughtful sound. "Not really."

He didn't know what else to say, so he said nothing. He helped her wash her hair, and tried not to think about how much weight she'd lost since he'd last seen her. When the bathwater was dirty and Hange looked much cleaner, he helped her out of the tub and dried her off himself, doing her hair last, toweling it dry and then running a comb through it. The oversized t-shirt sagged on her body more than it used to, but it looked nice. The sight made his chest tighten, and for a moment he feared that he'd start crying again for no reason at all except that she was there.

"Am I allowed to sleep now?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, and led her back to his room.

She didn't say anything when she saw all of her stuff sitting around cluttering up his limited living space. She went straight for the bed and crawled into it, settling down against the pillows with a sigh that made his throat close up.

Despite her story, he could only barely imagine what it must have been like for her to live by herself with nothing, hardly sleeping for fear of waking up to something terrifying, eating whatever it was she could find without knowing exactly what to even look for…

He dressed for bed himself, and was surprised, when he joined her, that she was still awake.

"I really missed you," she whispered when he blew out the candle.

"I thought you were dead."

"Nothing I couldn't handle, Levi."

"We went back to search for you a month ago. You weren't there."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"But—"

He cut her off with a kiss, short and soft. She hardly responded to it, eyes closed, breath already evening out. "Go to sleep already, shitty-glasses."

"Mm, closer."

"This bed is meant for one person. Is that not good enough for you?"

She didn't respond, but Levi gave in anyway, wrapping both arms around her and pulling her close to him.

Hange didn't squirm against his tight hold.

She was already asleep.

* * *

Levi didn't dare close his eyes, afraid that if he did, he would wake up and find out that everything was a sick dream.

Hange slept for a long time, not even shifting once in her sleep. She kept her face pressed against his neck, hand fisted in the fabric of his shirt, and she looked—

Well, she looked all right.

Her face was thinner and her complexion altered from all of her time spent outside, but her breathing was even and smooth and the weight of her in his arms was  _real_ , even if it was less than he remembered it being.

He was glad, suddenly, that he hadn't found anything substantial in the copse of trees where he'd parted ways with her three months earlier. That would have been only a part of her found, returned to him.

Here he was now, holding her.  _All_  of her.

He couldn't think about it. It made his throat close up again, made his chest ache. He spent the rest of the night just watching her sleep.

* * *

He was still watching her when the sun rose in the sky, when she stirred in his arms and tried to stretch, her elbow smacking him right in the face.

"Sorry," she mumbled, and immediately glued herself back to his side again.

"I thought you were dead," he said.

She blinked and tilted her head to look at him. "I'm not."

"I thought I had lost you."

"You didn't."

"Yeah?"

"I'm right here."

His grip on her tightened again. She was warm, and soft—a little bony, but she felt real, smelled real,  _seemed_   _real_.

"Do you need me to prove it?"

"Depends on how you plan to do that, shitty-glasses."

She touched his face, fingers brushing against his cheek and jaw, sliding down to his neck. This time, she kissed him—so lightly he was terrified that he imagined it, so he pulled her back for a longer one, a firm press of his lips against hers.

He could feel her lips turn up before she pulled away, before she brushed his hair out of his eyes. "You haven't slept, yet, have you?" she asked.

"Of course not."

"Well," she said, "sleep a little bit. I'll still be here when you wake up."

* * *

She was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As soon as I saw the prompt given to me for this story, I saw a loophole in it: the requester did not insist that anyone actually die. So I intended to incorporate part of an idea I saw floating around Tumblr, credit to [stupid-giant-naked-people](stupid-giant-naked-people.tumblr.com). Their actual prompt can be found [here](http://stupid-giant-naked-people.tumblr.com/post/62018583337/writing-prompt-levi-discovering-a-pair-of-blood). I wanted to use the idea of Levi thinking Hange was dead—and I wanted to use the crying part, too. I felt, though, that letting Levi cry after two days didn't work as well as if he had been given plenty of time to really believe that Hange was dead. That would make her very sudden appearance much more shocking, and therefore more likely to induce tears despite Levi's amazing emotional defenses.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story. (Feedback, as always, is wonderful.)


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